Dr. Mitch Katz is the Director of the Los Angeles County Health Agency, a new agency that combines the Departments of Health Services, Public Health and Mental Health into a single entity to provide more integrated care and programming within Los Angeles.
The agency has a budget of 7 billion dollars, 28,000 employees and a large number of community partners. For the past five years Dr. Katz served as the Director of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, the second largest public safety net system in the United States. During this time, he created the ambulatory care network and empaneled over 350,000 patients to a primary care home. He eliminated the deficit of DHS through increased revenues and decreased administrative expenses, and used the new Affordable Care Act funding to pay for a modern electronic health system, Orchid, which has now been implemented in 90 percent of DHS clinical sites. He has moved more than 1000 medically complex patients from hospitals and emergency departments into independent housing, thereby eliminating unnecessary expensive hospital care and giving the patients the dignity of their own home.
Dr. Katz continues to see patients every week as an outpatient physician at Edward R. Roybal Comprehensive Health Center and sees patients on the inpatient medicine service at LAC+USC, Harbor-UCLA, and Olive View-UCLA Medical Centers. Before he came to Los Angeles Dr. Katz was the Director and Health Officer of the San Francisco Department of Health for 13 years. He is well known for funding needle exchange, creating Healthy San Francisco, outlawing the sale of tobacco at pharmacies, and winning ballot measures for rebuilding Laguna Honda Hospital and San Francisco General Hospital. He is a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Medical School. He completed an internal medicine residency at UCSF Medical School and was an RWJ Clinical Scholar. He is the Deputy Editor of JAMA Internal Medicine, an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (previously the Institute of Medicine) and the recipient of the Los Angeles County Medical Association 2015 Healthcare Champion of the year.
Friday, July 15, 2016
12:00pm – 1:00pm
Soto Street Building 1 (SSB 115/116)
2001 N. Soto Street, Los Angeles, CA 90033
This talk is hosted by the Department of Preventive Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.
